Amid months of higher oil and gas prices, a much ballyhooed meeting between Biden administration officials and oil-industry executives at the White House, "went fine" says an industry analyst on the Marc Cox Morning Show.
Forbes Senior Contributor David Blackmon says, "nothing was really accomplished, but they did agree to have an ongoing dialogue. I guess that's probably really the best outcome we could have hoped for. At least there weren't any major blowups during the meeting."
A blowup could have been possible following rhetoric targeting the industry from President Joe Biden in recent weeks.
"Joe Biden accused them [Exxon-Mobil] of having more money than God," says Blackmon about the publicity. "Yeah, I think they're highly-offended, but it doesn't do them any good from a public relations standpoint to get into a vicious verbal battle with the President in public. So they have to go when they're asked and hold these meetings and do the best they can otherwise."
Why the high prices now? Blackmon explains to Ryan Wrecker, "everything has to do with scarcity. The oil market is under supplied because we've had eight years of under investing in finding new reserves."
"We haven't built a new refinery in this country in 44-years, 44 years! And that's because of government regulation. So refining capacity is scarce, and the demand for the product, gasoline, diesel and other refined products is very high, and supplies for that are scarce," continued Blackmon. "So when you have scarcity of any commodity, or any service, the price of that is going to go up."
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